won't you guess my name?
Context, says Mick, is just a shot away.
Mahmood Mamdani was featured in a provocative segment this morning on Democracy Now! (link here, but I don't see a full transcript up yet) to talk about his recent essay in the London Review of Books on the genocide in Darfur, "The Politics of Naming."
Among his many contentions about the overall lack of context the Save Darfur coalition and the press have given the American public inre: the conflict and attendant slaughter is the distinct possibility that the land the atrocities are being committed over in the Sudan has been profoundly changed in the last twenty years by global warming, a fresh new enviro horror that has been on the minds of military planners in recent months.
Much of what Mamdani alleges in his piece is about ownership of the word genocide, "naming" it, and more generally the context for it. If in fact a partial cause for "Darfur" - what's become the shorthand for the genocide there - is increased desertification via global warming, responsibility for "Darfur," as well as the role the West must acquiesce to, changes considerably.
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